Thread: Where, Oh Where, Did My Site Go?

About a month ago I got interested in SEO. We had been using our site as a basic online brochure, not really drawing in new business with it. I decided to try to change that.

For the last three weeks I optimized the site a bit and built a few backlinks- local directories, Manta, Yelp, here, etc. Much to my surprise, last week I started to see results. By Saturday I was on page one for 4 of the 6 keywords I am targeting. I was #4 for "portland lawn care".

Today- I am gone! None of my keywards are in the top 100.

The only thing I did this weekend was a small tweak on the site itself and claimed my "Places" listing.

Any ideas? Can you oversubmit a site? Is it because when I changed the URL of some of the pages the old pages still show up when you use google to search my site? Something else?

Google did a huge dump of sites off of google that were basically spamming and using alot of seo, It affected a few hundred thousand sites. Basically google frowns upon seo and all the methods used to help sites get to the top of google.

I would assume they targeted yours as one of the sites they didnt like. They basically un-indexed you.

There haven't been any significant Google algorithmic changes since April 3rd, although they are always tweaking. Going by what you presented us, I doubt your issues are related to any of those.

Is it because when I changed the URL of some of the pages the old pages still show up when you use google to search my site?

This is the most likely issue. If you changed page names/page titles, Google can view it as a significant enough change in perceived "site/page trust" and may drop you as they reassess your site.

In terms of over-submitting or too many back-links too quickly, you're fine.

In looking at your site, Google doesn't weigh meta keywords, but Bing does, but it's seems to be used to decide whether you're spammy or not, and whether they match the on-page content. You have a lot of keywords that really overlap or repeat. For what it's worth, I don't use, nor have used keywords for myself or any clients for quite some time. (As an amusing aside, I stumbled across an early post of mine while doing a search here. It was saying that meta keywords aren't necessary. It was from...2004. lol)

I would also Google "sitemap.xml" and "robots.txt" and create those so that the next time the search bots crawl your site, they'll have an easier time.

Its called the google dance, it happens once and a while. Best thing you can do if you find your serps drop because of link building is to keep the same link velocity, try to always use high quality links as well.